Self With Others #2 - Embracing Interconnection
If you’d rather listen to me reading this, you can access it here: https://bit.ly/SWO2
How do we become an Interconnected Self?
That’s the wrong question.
We’re all, already, Interconnected Selfs.
We were born that way. We die that way. It’s just that we forget during the bit in between.
We need to learn how to live interconnected - to recognise our interconnections and align with them better.
If we align our thoughts, actions and beliefs with how things really are, we get to live more sustainably, efficiently and with a lot less struggle.
A Isolated Self competes with the world. The Isolated Self fights for its share of resources and attention. It thinks when others gain it loses. The Isolated Self focuses on what divides it from the world.
The Interconnected Self understands it thrives when everything thrives. It understands that, though competition is powerful and empowering, competition operates best within a framework of collaboration. The Interconnected Self understands that by nurturing its connectedness, it aligns with the life force.
The Interconnected Self works with the world, not against it.
Self-With-Others is based in recognising that the Self is always in relationship with something or someone else.
We’re going to align with how the world actually is (which means challenging some of the assumptions we’ve all been brought up with). We’re going to develop techniques for altering how we interact with ourselves and everything around us. We’re going to become more focused, less anxious, more effective.
We’re going to learn to thrive.
Before we begin though, let’s dig a little deeper into three key ideas:
1. You do not have to change. You’re already an Interconnected Self. However much we each deny or ignore it, we’re part of the natural world. We - like everything else - interconnect. To ‘be an Interconnected Self’ doesn’t mean you have to change. It means recognising reality and learning to align with it better.
2. Interconnection is about relationship. When we recognise the world as interconnected, we start seeing, understanding and changing how one thing relates to another. We explore how to change relationships within the web of interconnection. To be an interconnected self is to become aware of how to work with all sorts of different relationships.
3. The idea of ‘self’ is not simple. ‘You’ are not a thing. ‘You’ are a network of internal relationships. This might sound strange, but you already know it. You talk about ‘my’ foot. You do not say “I am my foot’. ‘You’ have a relationship with your foot. You talk about ‘getting lost in your thoughts’. Your thoughts are activities ‘you’ get lost in, like you get lost in a forest. They’re part of you, but not the whole of you. There’s a relationship between ‘you’ and your thoughts. Your thoughts, feelings, sensations are ‘you’ but also things ‘you’ have a relationship with. We’re used to thinking of ‘self’ as a set of connections between one part of your brain (the bit that calls itself ‘I’) and other bits of you. When I talk of ‘self’ I’m not referring to a single thing, but to a network of internal relationships we each call ‘me’.
We’re interconnected within, and interconnected outside.
So why go on this journey into Self-With-Others?
We’re going to learn to notice, understand and change inner and outer relationships, to align ourselves with being fully, effectively and joyously human.
We’re going to learn to thrive in an interconnected world as an interconnected self.
When we recognise the reality of how we live and the environment we live in, we become more purposeful, compassionate, aligned and effective in every aspect of our lives.
We live better.
This is the journey we’re on.
I am offering this entire series of emails free. They represent the fruits of thirty years practical research and I’d rather they were out in the world than sitting on my computer.
If what I write is useful to you and you’d like to offer payment, you’re very welcome to buy me a virtual coffee